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Hardest phoneme you’ve ever faced | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6336 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 9 of 48 10 October 2010 at 3:55am | IP Logged | ||
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The Thai อื and the Mandarin x both gave me trouble. I overcame both of them with practice. I learned a lesson with
the อื just to let go and allow myself to make noises that sound silly and illogical to me, like cartoon noises I used to make when I was a kid. Very quickly I'll be producing that difficult sound, and then it's just a matter of practice. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| thephantomgoat Groupie United States Joined 5257 days ago 52 posts - 103 votes | Message 10 of 48 11 October 2010 at 2:22am | IP Logged | ||
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To date, Vietnamese is the hardest language to speak of any I've studied. Six tones.
Distinguishing t (voiceless) from th (aspirated) in listening and in pronunciation. Pronouncing ng/ngh (same sound, just spelled differently depending on the vowel that follows) at the beginning of a word. And the VOWELS. Single vowels, diphthongs, triphthongs, long vowels, short vowels, vowels with horns and vowels with circumflexes: ư, ơ, â, ê, ô, to start. It's a beautiful language, but producing anything close to a native speaker's speech is...well, quite the challenge for the adult learner, to put it mildly. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| thephantomgoat Groupie United States Joined 5257 days ago 52 posts - 103 votes | Message 11 of 48 11 October 2010 at 4:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Oops, forgot the answer the latter part(s) of the question...yes, the difficulty I've
had in speaking Vietnamese has hindered my progress. I can produce a semblance of decent speech when reading out loud, but it's much harder for me to improv (i.e. to hold an actual conversation). Even when I think I've got a good rhythm going, the heritage speakers among my friends have commented on the robotic quality of my speech, the greatly exaggerated tones and long pauses between words. For the time being, I've discontinued my study of Vietnamese, choosing instead to focus my energies on Mandarin. I'll return to Viet at some point; just not sure when. As for whether a language's phonology has ever discouraged me from learning it...the consonants in Hindi and in Arabic seem formidable, but if I decide to learn either or both, a matter of consonants won't be what stops me. :D And I second Lindsay19's response about the ch sound in German. I had no idea there were *two* of them (ich-Laut and ach-Laut) until I took a German linguistics course. Blew my mind to find out I'd been saying them wrong these past few years. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5772 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 12 of 48 11 October 2010 at 12:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ya, I thought the German ch was easy until I learned there were two. I'd been saying the "ich" sound for "ach" in all cases, apparently. I've been told that one of my "e" sounds in German is off too, but I find it hard to perceive and produce the difference.
In Punjabi, the difference between all the similar consonants (especially the different Rs) is hard for me to perceive, although when I read the description I'm able to produce them. I can do the retroflex flap R, but when I hear it, there's another one that I have trouble differentiating it from. Aspiration is difficult for me to perceive in a number of languages, including Punjabi. I guess the number one difficulty in German used to be the R as well. That back-of-the-throat R from German and French took me weeks and weeks of practice to be able to do half-ass, and it still throws me off sometimes when it's combined with certain other consonants. The front-of-the-tongue trilling R from Bulgarian and Spanish was much easier to master, although it still took me a lot of practice. Strangely, I found mandarin quite easy to pronounce (both tones and consonants), although I noticed that my classmates didn't. Maybe it was the extra listening I did, who knows. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5797 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 13 of 48 11 October 2010 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | ||
But that's a non-phonemic difference, so you'll be understood and you'll understand other people. It's only when two phonemes "fall together" in your speech that you start to have problems. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Scratch Groupie United States Joined 5021 days ago 45 posts - 57 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 14 of 48 11 October 2010 at 3:04pm | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, I've been sometimes browsing the material I've assembled to begin studying Finnish next year and I've been amazed by that. I'm so used to aspirating k, p, and t that it feels absolutely weird to say them without aspiration. That's got a big giveaway for accent, because it's probably always creeping in for native English speakers learning to speak Finnish. And especially P, English aspirates that strongly -- that's why we have the word puff, I bet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6368 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 15 of 48 11 October 2010 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Cantonese is tripping me up by not differentiating between sounds I'm used to differentiate between, namely dz-dj and ts-tch. They occur in complimentary distribution and I always hesitate on which one to use when speaking.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5353 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 16 of 48 11 October 2010 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | ||
Just so you know, p/t/k are also (usually) unaspirated in French (I often hear some aspiration before "i" and "u"). Edited by Levi on 11 October 2010 at 5:16pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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